General Question

HCl and lime mixture?

I have a pipe that I carved out of stone. A couple days ago it got dropped and snapped in half by someone who was borrowing it. They gave it to one of their friends who fixed it perfectly. It was actually astounding how smooth and perfect the fix was. I only got a few minutes to talk with him and he said to fix it he just mixed powdered lime and muriatic acid and used that to melt the stone together.

When I got home I tried googling this to find out more but havent really been having much luck. As far as I can tell what happened was that the lime was neutralized by the muriatic acid which I assume caused a lot of heat to be given off in the process.

Could someone explain better what exactly happened during this reaction and how I would go about replicating it(ratios) in the future if I ever needed it to fix something like this again?

@PhiNotPi yea I was thinking something like that too, its just interesting that whatever that compound is, it has the ability to completely fuse stone. Like really if I wasn’t told this pipe was broken at one point I could honestly never tell, its just that perfect.

The reaction between lime (calcium carbonate, CaCO3) and HCl produces calcium chloride (CaCl2), which is a solid at room temp. I’m no chemist but from what I read I’m not sure that’s useful in fixing broken stone. Also, “lime” might not be just calcium carbonate. For all the chemistry I took in school (6 semesters inorganic, 6 semesters organic) I didn’t learn much of practical value.

Update: went to the chem lab today and asked. I was told basically everything thats already been said here. They told me they would research exactly what was going on and let me know so ill post it here when i find out.